The reason to bother with this is that CDbCommand offers some retrieval options that don't require creation of any model objects. I had a very complex Criteria that I didn't want to rewrite as a Command or SQL and I only wanted to get the ids of ~1000 models, rather than create 1000 models and loop. You can get an array of ids like this:

$command->select('id')->queryColumn();

Doing this brought the memory footprint of my request from 40mb+ to around 19mb. I hope this helps save you some time!

John M
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